Jason Statham is one of the best action movie stars of all time and one of the few performers who can pull off risky stunts by himself.
For an English actor, stunts might not seem all that unusual. After all, he’s a skilled diver. He participated for England in the 1990 Commonwealth Games as a member of the British national diving squad. In addition, he does karate, wing chun, Chinese kickboxing, and other martial arts.
He plays the hard-bitten, grizzled, and proficient action hero on screen. He is convincing and thrilling in action scenes because of his agility, fighting prowess, and no-nonsense demeanor. It makes sense that a number of his movies, beginning with his feature debut in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), have become huge box office hits. His movies have really brought in over USD 1.5 billion to date, demonstrating not only his commercial popularity but also his stability as a lucrative action star.
His antics are undoubtedly one of his main draws. They give his action sequences more realism and intensity. His commitment to carrying out a number of them alone enhances his reputation as a true action hero.
Additionally, he is a fervent supporter of giving cinema stunt performers greater credit. He claimed in a 2013 Vanity Fair interview that the Academy Awards’ stunt category is underappreciated.
Given “how much responsibility these coordinators have for some of the greatest entertainment in action movies,” Statham stated, “I think it is an overlooked category.” The unsung heroes are all of the stuntmen, really. They truly are. They are losing all credibility. They’re taking a neck risk. Additionally, there are sly actors who pose as though they are performing the stunts.
He went on, “It’s a complete injustice in my opinion.”
Statham is also full of compliments for some of his co-stars, especially Sylvester Stallone, who often performs stunts by himself.
During the course of his career, Statham has sustained numerous injuries, as he stated in a different interview. “A lot of the things we do are motivated by our desire for authenticity and sometimes our ego gets in the way. We want everyone to know that’s what we’re doing. We want the viewers to follow along.
It should come as no surprise that he performed the stunts in his most recent movie, The Beekeeper, considering his reputation and voice for doing stunt work. To further inhabit the role of Adam Clay, the movie’s beekeeper, he really studied beekeeping as well. It is said that not a single bee sting occurred to him throughout filming.
“He’s an athlete who performs his own stunts. He’s got a ton of action experience, incredible physical prowess, and a keen eye for camera angles. Though he drove me to school, I’ve done a lot of action. However, outside of work, Jason is a pleasant, ordinary, down-to-earth guy, The Beekeeper director David Ayer said to Variety of Statham’s role.
Stunts performed by Jason Statham in his movies
The Italian Job (2003)
Image credit: 2003 Paramount Pictures via IMDb
A reimagining of the critically acclaimed The Italian Job from 1969, which raised the bar for action movie stunts in the process, was a given given that the original created a standard that all subsequent action movies have to adhere to.
Along with Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, Seth Green, Mos Def, and Donald Sutherland, Jason Statham is the main star of the remake. Handsome Rob, the team’s wheelman, is portrayed by Statham. As one might anticipate, the English actor performed a significant number of the stunts by himself. The well-known boat chase scene in Venice from The Italian Job is his most notable stunt performance.
The film’s director, F. Gary Gray, stated in an interview that he preferred not to use visual effects or computer generated imagery. The boat that his character is seen escaping on was piloted by Statham.
In the interview, Green, who played Lyle, stated, “You see both of our faces in the boats cuz he is really driving it.” Statham, on the other hand, “piloted like 45 miles an hour.”
Statham admitted that he didn’t have much boating experience.
It’s far more challenging than it appears. It is vital that you possess a comprehension of the pace, arc, and drift that you are executing, the speaker stated.
The actor emphasized how challenging the stunt was as the boat entered the little canals and the low-hanging bridges passed almost inches above the heads of the camera crew.
Transporter 2 (2005)
Jason Statham believes that of all the risky stunts he has performed in his films, the one in Transporter 2 came the closest to his demise. Louis Leterrier’s English-language French action film is a follow-up to his 2002 feature The Transporter.
While all of Transporter 2’s action scenes are amazing, one stands out above the others.
In one of the movie’s action sequences, Frank Martin, played by him, jumps from a jet ski to the back of a bus. There were no safety lines, so Statham might have made a mistake and ended himself in a coma—a risk he thinks he shouldn’t have taken.
I made a small leap from the rear of a jet ski onto the back of a bus in the Transporter 2. Not a terribly safe stunt, that one. There was no safety wire, therefore I shouldn’t have done it, but I did it nonetheless. It would have been a faceplant into the concrete at thirty miles per hour if I had not noticed the back of the bus. Simply stupid stuff I’ve done,” the actor said to Collider.
Crank (2006)
Image credit: IMDb
Imagine clinging on to your dear life from the side of a helicopter just for the sake of a stunt. Some actors may have done that in recent years, but Jason Statham did that years ago in Crank.
One of the most death-defying stunts performed by any actor ever in movies, Jason Statham dangled out of a helicopter over 900 metres in the air over Los Angeles as his character exchanged blows with the villain played by Jose Pablo Cantillo.
It is an insane scene, made crazier when it is known that the actor himself and not a stunt double who was doing the entire action sequence in the helicopter.
“How do you train for hanging out of a helicopter? You just go and do it,” Statham famously said when he was asked how he performed the stunt.
He later confirmed to Collider that it was indeed a real helicopter sequence.
“There have been a couple of situations. I think when we shot Crank, we were hanging out of a real helicopter,” he said.
“A lot of the things we do now – with The Expendables – anytime you’re on a helicopter it’s usually on a green screen. But with Crank, we were actually in a helicopter. We’re shooting a fight scene where I was standing on the skids, we have a small pick there. So it was a real stunt, you know, that one was pretty tricky,” added Statham.
The Expendables 3 (2014)
Image credit: Phil Bray – 2014 – Lionsgate via IMDb
The Expendables is one of the best-known action film franchises in the last two decades. It is hailed by fans of the genre for bringing together some of the biggest action superstars of the 1980s and the 1990s on the big screen, with many iconic pairings seen for the first time.
Besides Statham, whose character Lee Christmas is one of the two main leads alongside Sylvester Stallone’s Barney Ross, the top names who have been part of the franchise to date are Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Antonio Banderas, Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson.
In The Expendables 3, Christmas, Barney and the rest of the team members go after Mel Gibson’s arms dealer character Conrad Stonebanks. One high-octane action scene from the film shows Terry Crews’ character, Caesar, coming to the rescue of Barney and the rest of the team as they battle Conrad and his men.
Statham is seen driving a truck to keep his team safe in that sequence. According to Screenrant, a brake malfunction in the truck led to it plunging off the pier where the sequence was being shot into the sea. Statham could have drowned, but his deft swimming and survival skills helped him crawl out of the truck’s window and escape before it sank.
Mechanic: Resurrection (2016)
Image credit: IMDb
The poster of Mechanic: Resurrection shows Statham scaling a high-rise with a gun in hand.
It is not clear if part of the stunt, when performed in the film, featured CGI, but Jason Statham can be expected to undertake such daring feats in his movies all by himself — quite like Tom Cruise, who carried out one of the greatest stunts in movie history with the Burj Khalifa sequence in Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011).
Nevertheless, Statham performed the stunt in the film. It is in this sequence that he eliminates his target while the latter is swimming in a glass-bottom pool jutting out of the top floor of the building.
“I think you have to get used to heights. You know, I’m not used to certain types of heights. But I don’t really get sort of a vertigo feeling,” Statham told Screenrant when asked to comment about the scene.
The Meg (2018)
Image credit: IMDb
The Meg is loosely based on the 1997 novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten. It is about the threat to the seas caused by a 23-metre megalodon shark. Chinese actors Li Bingbing and Winston Chao are among the main stars in the film.
Jason Statham didn’t actually battle a gigantic shark in The Meg. But, yes, some of the sequences in the water were real. And they were tough.
In an interview on Hollywood Outbreak, the actor said that he had to hang on to a structure resembling the shark’s head that the production team created, which was then rapidly moved about underwater.
“They pull it this way and they put it on a pulley that way. And it’s underwater so there’s so much resistance you know it can’t just be…it’s very hard to explain…if you’ve ever tried to be pulled at great speed underwater, everything wants to go on way but the body just resists against the mass of the water,” he said.
“It’s really tough to do to be thrashed around on [sic.]water is an impossible thing,” added Statham, underlining the difficulty of filming a key sequence in the film.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
Image credit: Daniel Smith – Universal Pictures/IMDb
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is the first spin-off movie in the Fast & Furious franchise. Set after the events of The Fate of the Furious (2017), the eighth instalment in the series, the film revolves around the characters played by Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson in the main franchise. The film also stars Idris Elba, Vanessa Kirby, Eiza González, Cliff Curtis and Helen Mirren in pivotal roles.
Directed by David Leitch, the high-octane action movie features an array of death-defying stunts, some of which were performed by Jason Statham.
The most significant stunt scene that Statham himself executes is a chase sequence in what is depicted as a Ukraine warehouse in the film.
“It’s Jason driving,” Leitch said, according to the New York Post. “Because he’s so good, we felt comfortable putting him in that position.”
The film proved to be a blockbuster, earning over USD 760 million at the worldwide box office.
The Expendables 4 (2023)
Image credit: IMDb
Much of The Expendables 4 is CGI, as would be evident to anyone who watches movies with an eagle eye. But there are some original sequences as well. One of them is a motorcycle chase scene through the inside of a cargo ship. Even though it is filmed primarily on Statham, the coolest part of the stunt was performed by Australian stunt bike performer and X Games gold medalist Robbie Maddison.
Nevertheless, Statham got to do another major stunt on his own — and it was no less dangerous than any other because he had to go head-to-head with Indonesia action film icon and martial arts expert Iko Uwais. In fact, the film’s director, Scott Waugh, said that the fight sequence between the two is his personal favourite.
Uwais, who is trained in the Indonesian martial arts silat, is best known for the ground-breaking action film The Raid (2011) and its sequel The Raid 2 (2014).
“It’s got two great fight actors in cinema right now,” Waugh told Gamespot. “Obviously, Iko from The Raid. Everyone knows how b***** that guy is. And to put them together and let these two just go at it without stunt doubles and design an amazing fight. It’s, you know, four-and-a-half minutes long. It was, for me, awesome, and I think ends in absolute Expendables style.”
Meg 2: The Trench (2023)
Image credit: IMDb
Jason Statham reprises his role in the sequel to The Meg and, according to director Ben Wheatley, wherever audiences see him doing stunts “almost all of it is him.”
“Because the physics of a face are hard to fake — you have to be upside down to really look like you are upside down — we had Jason on this kind of giant hand drill set-up, and we’d pull the trigger and spin him around, firing water at his face,” said Wheatley.
“He wanted as few gimbal shots as possible, almost all of it is him -obviously not jumping a giant wave, but him riding a jet ski very, very quickly. And scarily, we were all at the monitors, saying, ‘Please come back all right!” added the director.
According to some reports, Statham even swam with real sharks to learn their behaviour. Filming was done mostly in Thailand, where huge tanks, some 18 metres wide and 5 metres deep, were set up for the water sequences. Of course, CGI has had a major role to play, but Statham is in almost all the water sequences in the film, including the ones where he is seen riding a jet ski at high speed.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
– Which was the best stunt by Jason Statham?
Jason Statham says that he shouldn’t have done a particular stunt in Transporter 2 because he did it without a harness and a mistake would have meant he would fall flat on his face at a speed of 30 miles per hour on the road.
– Which Jason Statham movie has the most stunts?
All movies of Jason Statham are action films, meaning that all of them are loaded with stunts. Some of them, which have quite a few dangerous stunts performed by the actor or body doubles, include Hobbs & Shaw and the films in The Expendables franchise.